I’ve only been abroad one time, and there were little gecko/lizard things everywhere, climbing up walls and scurrying across roads, and nobody cared. I was constantly fascinated but to the locals they’re just kinda there.
Bonus question to anyone who visited the UK - was there anything that fascinated you but I’d be taking for granted?
Pic unrelated.
The lack of a speed limit on our highways. Some people come here just to drive on a boring frigging highway.
Bonus question to anyone who visited the UK - was there anything that fascinated you but I’d be taking for granted?
Double decker buses maybe. I found them pretty cool compared to the boring buses we usually have here.
Edit: Also, urban foxes. I saw foxes maybe three times in my life before going to London, where they’re basically seen as a nuisance.
no speed limit is annoying as fuck. there is absolute chaos on the autobahn because of it. everyone drives at different speeds and dangerous manouvres (like tailgating, driving 200 kmh on a full road or in the rain) are common occurances. i hate driving in germany. we are an idiot nation when it comes to driving and cars in general
Yeah, I could do without it. When it’s really empty, it can be nice to go 180 for a bit, but more often than not, it causes the kind of problems you mentioned.
Driving 200 kmh is also incredibly wasteful
But it’s super fun
So one fact that I like telling people in America and they dont fully understand: I have 2 speeding tickets in my life and both come from the autobahn
username checks out!
how did you get them?
So only between cities is it without speed. Which I didnt know when I first got there. The next time I was just being dumb, showing off, and didnt notice
The worst part is when you get a ticket, especially at night, they essentially flash bang you to get a clear picture of your face. So not only are you speeding but now your blind for a couple seconds.
it actually creates a lot of traffic jams too. The differences in speed and the goal to drive even faster produce hard braking moments which have a chain reaction. Especially in rush hour, where it matters, we really don’t get anywhere faster.
We are stupid for not limiting speed
Imagine drivers 10x worse and that’s the USA.
We had bendy buses for a brief moment.
Now those wouldn’t actually be exciting to me as a German, that’s the type of bus I rode to school on. :)
i NORCAL they are basically on the most of the lines that travel the longest routes.
Urban foxes are in every city. Foxes and coyotes. You just dont see them often.
Coyotes are only a thing in the Americas, I’m pretty sure.
Forgive an old bushcrafter. I default to my known region.
Anecdotally I would say that London specifically, rather than the UK as a whole, has either an unusually high population of foxes or a unusually bold one. I’ve never seen so many out in the open as there
When I visited the US I was excited to see squirrels running around. We don’t have squirrels where I’m from. We took pictures.
It must have looked like we were excited to witness a cloud in the sky.
I saw my first chipmunk last week and I totally screamed oh shit there’s Alvin! in my heart.
Don’t let your inner child die!
I still remember my first chipmunk encounter. I heard the little guys before I saw them and wondered “who the f is out here playing laser tag in the woods? ”
I love when people see deer here in North America. You’d think they’re seeing a unicorn, when it’s just some plain ol’ mule deer.
Forest rats.
Totally me in the US! Deers in Europe are stuff for natural parks!
I always lived in states where deer hunting was a pretty common pastime. The first time I went to a zoo in South America, I cracked up when we got to the display of white-tailed deer.
I understand Australians have a similar reaction to zoo kangaroos
Chipmunks did it for me. They look and act so much like cartoon critters I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
When I visited Canada from the US, my extended family and I drove in separate cars, thereby arriving at separate times spread out over a few hours.
Every group of us took basically the same picture when we arrived because we’d previously only seen brown squirrels and there was a solid, dark black one running around in the back yard.
My parents’ neighborhood is ALL black squirrels. I thought they were rare until they moved (only 30 minutes from where I group up) so I was quite surprised to see dozens in their yard
It’s funny what people notice. I have a friend who grew up in the American Southwest, and her wildlife culture shock when she moved away from there came from wild rabbits.
The Southwest is populated by jackrabbits, so after they encountered an eastern cottontail, they were genuinely concerned some malady had befallen it to cause it to have such small ears. She thought maybe someone was torturing the local wildlife and cutting off its ears.
I love this and was about to post something similar because my family met a family from Australia at Disney World and the little girl was SO excited about the squirrels. It was adorable.
I live in the Midwest, so squirrels are just always there.
Used to work at Disney World. Can confirm the squirrel amazement. (And I worked at Animal Kingdom, the squirrels occasionally got more attention than the actual zoo animals. Although the local ibises hanging out with the spoonbills were still cool.)
Oh wow. I saw a squirrel once in Catalonia. Wonderful sight.
My wife is from the Philippines. Squirrels are a thing you have to visit the zoo the see.
Mirroring what others have said - at a nearby university that has (had? sigh) a large foreign student population, some folks actively feed the squirrels. For several weeks at the beginning of the school year, you could very easily spot new students by who was out taking photos and getting mobbed by these squirrels that are way, way too comfortable getting close to humans.
I’d guess people from monkey countries feel the same way about them impressing us. They’re in similar niches and everything.
No squirrels? You from Greenland? Antarctica?
Israel
These fellas
On the flipside, when I was in Japan some old guy mocked me for taking a photo of a no littering sign.
Hahaha that sign is so charming though
And it’s another example of “if you don’t want me to do it, don’t make it look so fun”.
Cheeky little guy, he can’t even keep his ear and trunk behind the red line. That elephant truly does not care for our silly human rules.
Someone Japanese said you were taking too many pictures? Haha, that’s ironic given what they’re like abroad.
I was visiting my friends in centrall europe and one if them wanted to show me the local speciality. We travelled 45 minutes by car and other 45 minutes by foot to look teeny tiny swamp. It was line 4m² and It was protectect area. My friend was really proud to show it to me.
I live in country where 26% of our landmass is swamps and wetlands…
Depositing bottles.
Put them into a machine, and it gives you money back 🤯
Nun weiß ganz Deutschland, dass du hier bist
I’m in this picture and I don’t like it.
But, yeah, seems like such an obviously good idea and it works so well. Why can’t we do that?
Bikes! I live in Copenhagen and they’re everywhere of course. I love seeing people at a big train station taking pics of cycle parking being overfull
At a train station in Amsterdam, there were so many bikes parked you couldn’t count them. And it wasn’t a major hub. I just stared in wonder.
Same, im in The Netherlands.
The first time my cousins from FL visited Canada, it was July. They were surprised there was no snow. So, we took them over to the rec centre and they saw a small pile of snow out back. They were thrilled.
It was dumped out of a Zamboni.
Grew up in Ontario and it was always fun as a kid to grab some of the shaved ice behind rec centres to throw at your friends when it was like 33C out
Not my country, but something that fascinated me in Greece. Greece is a land of honey…and marble rock. Beautiful, swirling, sparkly rock in all different shades. It is so terribly abundant that they use marble in place of concrete.
To the Greeks, it is normal to use marble literally everywhere. They disrespect the beautiful stone, turning it into a curb on the street & slathering it in yellow paint. I saw a yellow curb that was cracked open - exposing the glittering marble rock inside. I found it so funny & sad that I took a picture. We love marble, we think it’s so decadent & fancy, it’s flooring in the finest hotels, businesses, and homes. These people just use marble everywhere; it’s just a rock to them. 😆
It really puts things into perspective.
Marble is expensive in places where there isn’t already a lot of it simply because it’s HEAVY.
But it also isn’t used in the fancy rich places simply because it’s expensive, it’s also because it’s beautiful.
I feel like it’s 80% the expense. If most rock was like that everybody would be looking for boring sandstone.
Do rich people in Greece import sandstone?
Good question!
I would guess not widely, just because rich people get around, and standards of luxury are more interconnected than that.
In the past, you have things like spices being worth their weight in gold in Europe, and cheap in India. Or how the Inuit prized wood because it didn’t grow anywhere they lived. Aluminum was a luxury metal originally, and there’s stories about Napoleon using it for cutlery as a step up from silver.
It wouldn’t surprise me if fancy people in Greece would use granite instead.
I grew up in a place that looks like Greece, but the rocks are red.
Same thing - amazing mesas and red rock plateaus and craggy mountains? See it every day. Meh. Crystal blue seas? I can’t stop starting and being amazed that something that color is real.
Though, I have noticed that very flat and forested places give me a sense of claustrophobia. When you’re used to being able to see 20-50 miles all the time, not being able to see anything more than 200 feet away is strange. It makes the world seem so small and trite.
Leaves.
Yes, tree leaves.
Each fall when they start changing color flocks of tourists come up to gawk at them.
This is what I was going to say.
In the late 1800s when Jasper Cropsey was exhibiting landscape paintings in the UK, folks didn’t believe that his colour palette was accurate
https://collections.brandywine.org/objects/2656/autumn-on-the-brandywine-river
Wait hang on, the UK has heaps of trees that go that colour every year
Painting is of a river in Pennsylvania. The artist painted it while there, then displayed it in the UK. Many who saw it, not being familiar with the fall colors of the northeast US, thought it was fake.
I know, I’m saying that the UK gets the same colours at the same time of year. It should not have been weird to that audience
You forget that the world was B/W until the sixties, give or take.
North American trees species have evolved to have more vibrant fall colors than European species.
So you’re basically proving that British guy’s point that yes, they are a different color but no-one believes it because they think they know what fall looks like in temperate climates.
When I was a kid we hosted two Trinidadians as part of an exchange in the Autumn and they’d never seen the leaves falling - they were worried that all the trees were dying off. This isn’t a “stupid foreigner” gag, it was probably just the thing that shocked them the most. They loved the trains and the narrowboats.
I had a similar experience with an exchange student who visited in february. She very worriedly asked why our trees didn’t have any leaves and was amazed when I said that just happens in winter and they come back.
I just made much the same comment!
One of the guys that came for our February wedding was truly alarmed at all the dead tress. I couldn’t figure out why he was saying that, but he was a tree guy so I went with it.
10 years later I figured it out. He assumed none of the trees dropped leaves because Florida. Some do, some don’t, some stay yellow all winter and drop in the spring. It’s not even consistent within species.
We visited DC in the fall last year. It took us close to 2 hours to walk from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial statue because my wife was taking pictures of all the trees along the way.
I just moved to New England and this will be my first fall here. My property is completely surrounded by 50’+ trees. I’m sure it will get old quick.
Especially if you need to rake them up etc.
To be fair it’s very pretty. I get that one
Michigan, or New York?
I grew up in Portsmouth, England. Some my friends would come to school from the Isle of Wight on the hovercraft service. We all thought the hovercraft was pretty cool, but I only recently found out that it’s the only commercially operated hovercraft in the whole world.
Is it still operating? For some reason I thought it stopped quite a while ago. Or maybe that’s the one that used to cross the channel.
Yeah, still running like normal: https://www.hovertravel.co.uk/.
Yes it is! Costs £20 if i remember correctly
I grew up in Gosport and enjoy the looks I get when describing that we needed to get a ferry across the harbour if we wanted to go to a club like Walkabout. I hear the overnight ferry stopped running so you’re screwed trying to get home late now.
I was in pompy 2 years ago and yes i found the hovercrafts cool. I didnt know that fact! Thanks! I wonder if my boyfriend from pompy knows that fact too.
Fratton is quite scary though ngl
There used to be one across the channel but it was discontinued some time ago. I took it once. It was cramped and noisy, but fast.
Lakes. My small city has 330 lakes. There are more lakes in Canada than the rest of the world combined.
Ontario has lakes bigger than some countries
I moved to the midwest USA 15 years ago and I still can’t get over the trees screaming at me. It’s deafening but no one seems to care.
The trees are silent where I come from
Em, what?
oh, riiiiiight. Did you know someone who moved from CA complained to the town hall open mic night in my town about them? As in “what will we do about the noise?”
I live in Cincinnati and I care. I find the cicadas incredibly annoying. Not only the noise, they also leave their shells all over the place and walking down the sidewalk creeps me out. crunch crunch crunch
We have cicadas in Provence, but only when I moved to Japan did I understand the meaning of the adjective deafening. They must be a different species. I had to actually scream to my partner to be heard.
must be a different species
They are! Japanese cicadas are more shrill than the ones found in other parts of the world, and even the different subspecies within Japan have different frequencies they shrill at. I swear the cicadas in Okinawa were more ear piercing than the ones around Tokyo when we visited, but my family didn’t believe me :')
Sweet, appreciate the info
To answer OP’s question, I’m American but spent a few years in the UK. Things that fascinated me included:
- How green it is (being from Texas this was the first thing that stood out to me)
- The shear amount of history that is just everywhere (I remember eat lunch at a park and reading a sign about how it was the site of a huge battle during the war of the roses)
- Pubs (man I miss going to my local. We really don’t have 3rd places in the US anymore)
The history. Jesus fuck, it’s the history. I swear in the south we talk about things from the 1920s like that shit is ancient. Meanwhile in the UK you’re just casually staying at a hotel that was built in the 1600s.
Yes, the amount of ancient history anywhere across the pond is fascinating. You’re walking in the same place as people from books and movies. I guess that we’re writing somewhere near the beginning of the local historical record is interesting in it’s own way, but there’s just not as much to say about it.
When I was a kid I got in the local library and looked at their copies of the maps of our city going back maybe 2000 years. A few things had been there that long, the high street and the cathedral, couple of other places. You could see how the town had grown, and sometimes contracted - it got hit hard a few times by plague, fire, and war. The maps didn’t go back further but the place had been occupied much longer, way before the Romans came.
Hmm, cathedral contemporaneous with the New Testament happening in the first place. Nimes?
It could be Greece too, I guess. Or maybe you’re rounding up, there’s more options then.
Another option is I’m full of shit! I just looked it up, it is Worcester cathedral and was founded in 680. I think what I put in my comment was a childhood memory that I somehow never questioned.
That’s still pretty good, Europe was yet to really recover from the collapse of Rome at that point. I’ll just call it rounding up.
I’m lucky enough that I see these little guys on a regular basis.
The first time I went to London, the size of the Ravens caught me off guard. I couldn’t get enough of seeing those things. We only really see Grackles in South Texas that regularly and they’re half the size, so I’m sure I was the weird bird guy that day to many people.
Deer. They are so common in this area they practically press the walk button to walk across the street. “hi bob. You gonna eat some more grass today. Yup ok. See ya later.”
